


On Brotherhood

by boromir_queries_sean



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Brotp, Gen, Inadvertent Matchmaking, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Canon, Sam & Goodnight friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-11
Packaged: 2018-09-16 17:58:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9283517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boromir_queries_sean/pseuds/boromir_queries_sean
Summary: Sam Chisolm meets Goodnight Robicheaux and immediately feels a sense of fraternal responsibility.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I've been attempting to work on the next chapter of [On Soul-Matches, and Where to Find Them](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8751832) but I kept getting distracted by thinking about Sam brothering Goody, and that combined with a talk I was having with [Nopholom](http://nopholom.tumblr.com/) about Sam arranging for Goody to run into Billy because he didn't want him to be alone anymore to create this.
> 
> It's unbetaed. I've taken some slight liberties with Sam and Goodnight's first meeting, but I do apologize for anything additionally that might seem in error.

Sam Chisolm starts a bar fight in some nowhere town in the middle of Arkansas. Thankfully, the man who he’d first knocked out of his seat had also been the man who Sam had been tracking, and he’d been able to bargain the price on this man’s head against the damages to the bar and the anger of the locals, buying his way swiftly out of a town now filled with residents even more on edge than they had been upon seeing him ride in.

He leaves, nursing a split lip and feeling far wearier than when he’d arrived; the inn had been willing to rent to him, and he’d been looking forward to stretching out on something more forgiving than dirt and rock. He urges his horse forward and sighs, trying to forget about the missed opportunity for a decent night’s rest by focusing on the person actually responsible for this mess.

Someday, Sam truly hopes to have the chance to give the deity who saw fit to throw Goodnight Robicheaux into his path a good and well deserved shake.

~~~

Sam’s traveling west at the time, making for his Ma’s house in Illinois, more than eager to see his family again, when he’s distracted by the sounds of a fight. When he comes closer, he realizes that, more accurately, it’s a pummeling. There’s a figure on the ground, clothed in grimy, tattered gray, being struck at by a half dozen men wearing fury on their faces. The war is over, in that papers have been signed by people with more money and power than most of those who fought in it, but that scant amount of ink isn’t nearly enough to immediately cool the harsh tempers of men who’ve been spilling each other’s blood for years. Sam understands this fully, yet he still can’t ride on and let this continue. The war is over.

Sam attempts to explain this, being, he feels, completely reasonable, but his gun ends up being more persuasive than his words. Eventually, however, he runs off his countrymen and is left with a pained bundle of bones that was a soldier, once.

The Angel of Death, according to the fearful gossip that had been swirling through Sam’s regiment at least since ’62 and the braggadocious headlines spat out in perpetuity by the Rebel papers, is a giant of a man, steely eyed and uniquely cruel in his revelrous attitude towards victories, notching up his death count along the barrel of a rifle that never failed in its aim. As such, Sam figures that he can be excused for not immediately recognizing said awe-inspiring figure of Confederate might when he first runs across him.

~~~

The man on the ground in front of him is at least a decade younger than Sam and, once Sam pulls him to his feet, he proves to be several inches shorter as well, both of which are emphasized by his emaciated condition. He’s missing a boot and a tooth and his hair is growing out from being shorn, poorly, down to his scalp. His uniform, dirt caked and bloodied, hangs from his body.

It’s his eyes, though, that Sam will always remember. They’re a blue wet with tears, but they also burn with bitter disappointment. He hadn’t wanted to be saved.

~~~

Although he’s favoring his right leg and moving like his ribs might be sore, most of the man seems to be bruised rather than broken. He’d taken the canteen when Sam had offered it over, coughing down a few swallows of water, but he hasn’t said a word, although his disappointed eyes have turned decidedly confused and maybe a little wary. He hasn’t moved to leave, however, and Sam finds himself oddly thankful for that.

He takes back his canteen, and then reaches out a slow hand to rest gently on the man’s shoulder. “Hey,” he forces out a smile, makes sure that it goes up to meet his eyes, “you got someplace to be?” He’s met with more silence and a deeper sense of confusion, and Sam’s starting to wonder just how hard his head had been knocked. 

It’s still daylight, but the sky is starting to purple up around the edges, and Sam isn’t quite sure how far off his aggressors have run. Before he can really think about what he’s doing, he’s putting careful pressure on the man, directing him towards Sam’s horse. He gives him a leg up, then mounts behind him, and nudges the animal forward at a lope, figuring they can make camp once the light has gone out a little more.

~~~

Sam gets more than three full days of silence from the man, which he’ll later recall with false fondness, once he realizes how utterly out of character they were. As he’s lighting a fire on the end of the third day, the man let’s out a strangled sort of sob and asks, “What am I doing here?”

His words are hoarse and his accent is from further south than Sam would have guessed. He’s bent over Sam’s bedding, smoothing it out with hands that he’d scrubbed nearly raw at the first clear stream that they’d stopped at to water the horse, his eyes fixed far more firmly on his task than they need to be. “You seem to be making my bed.”

That earns him a bit of stuttered laughter, and those blue eyes come up to meet his. “Why’d you force those boys off of me?” he clarifies, “You could see what I was.”

“Outnumbered?” Sam suggests.

“Truly deserving of the righteous retribution that I was being most soundly dealt,” he counters. 

“Because you’re a Confederate? So you ought to get beat on by every boy in blue from here until you get far enough south that that no longer matters?”

The man smiles at him in a shaky, broken motion that puts the gap in his teeth on display. “Because I’m the Angel of Death.”

~~~

He isn’t sure what Goodnight had expected to gain from the revelation, if Sam had seemed likely to strike out or cast him off once he knew who he was traveling with, or if he’d just been feeling guilty from not letting him know, thus depriving Sam of being able to chose to do either of those things, sooner. Knowing him now, it was probably the guilt.

What Sam had actually done was to turn back to kindling up a decent fire, finishing the task at hand before saying, “Those papers really did not capture your likeness.”

It’s that night that the screaming first starts.

~~~

They travel together for over a month, picking up a scant bit of work along the road that gets them a few hot meals and a set of clothing that doesn’t hang so severely from Goodnight’s skinny body. They get a second horse when Sam gets the drop on a lone gunman who’d been trying to persuade Goodnight to turn over his empty purse while Sam was off collecting firewood, and Goodnight manages to earn himself a new pair of boots by charming the men he’s challenged to a game of vingt-et-un so thoroughly that they don’t notice that he’s counting cards.

Goodnight talks more and more as they go, filling up every bit of silence he can find with waves of poetry, folktales, and his own original brand of florid bullshit. Sam is more than capable of holding up his end of the conversation, and he finds himself enjoying it. He’s not often asked to share his thoughts on literature, and he relishes the way that Goodnight’s eyes light up every time that he does, seeming to be ceaselessly pleased that Sam hasn’t tired of him yet. His eyes have also started to lose their tinge of desperation, and Sam is more than contented with keeping their discourse away from their immediate past if this is the result.

~~~

Eventually, though, they’ve journeyed far enough that Sam feels compelled to broach topics that have the potential to stir up Goodnight’s demons during daylight hours.

They’re moving closer and closer to Sam’s home and family, and Goodnight still hasn’t mentioned whether he has anyone waiting for him anywhere. On a day that seems particularly lighthearted, Sam brings up how much he’s been missing his Ma’s cooking and how dearly he’s looking forward to tasting it again, and how he hasn’t missed his sisters’ teasing at all, but that he’s going to be grateful for its return nevertheless. Goodnight is quiet again for a long moment before he quirks a smile at Sam and declares that he won’t have any idea about what teasing sisters are really like until he’s tried being the baby brother.

It’s a start. Maybe Goodnight isn’t so enthused about having a family to go home to as he could be, but Sam feels relieved knowing that he’s got _someone_ all the same.

~~~

They’ve crossed into St. Clair County and Goodnight still hasn’t made to turn south. Sam shoves his razor at him, suggesting that he trim up the scruffy facial hair he’s been letting grow and he has them both take the time to properly shake out their coats.

The sun is down when they come into Brooklyn, so Sam is careful to make plenty of noise when they ride up to the house. Hannah’s a crack shot, and he wouldn’t fault her at all for reacting if it seemed that strange men were sneaking up on them. Candlelight flickers inside and Ellen’s voice responds to his knock almost immediately, suggesting that there’s at least one member of the family who he won’t be waking up.

It turns out that it’s a mending night, so both girls and Ma as well are awake and bent over their work. Ma completely upends hers going to throw her arms around Sam’s neck, and he carefully wraps himself around her small frame, bracing himself for the impact of Hannah and Ellen against them. He finds himself completely enfolded by the Chisholm women, losing himself for a moment in just how happy he is.

He’s brought back to the world by the tentative tread of Goodnight’s feet as he finishes tying up their horses. He’d been undeniably anxious about coming here, but apparently he’d wanted to be anywhere else even less. Goodnight’s collar is done all the way up and his spine is straighter than Sam’s ever seen it, but he’s worrying his hat in his hands and standing a few paces away from the open door, clearly waiting to be told what to do.

Sam pulls himself away from the family huddle and gestures back towards Goodnight. “Ma, I’d like you to meet a friend of mine.”

~~~

Apparently nobody is that surprised by Sam letting a Confederate sharpshooter follow him home, save for Goodnight himself, who remains continually prepared to be turned away.

Ma had taken one look at him before demanding that he come inside and have himself something to eat. She hadn’t so much as blinked when he’d reluctantly offered his name while bowing gallantly over her hand, although Sam knows that she’d been faithfully following the rumblings of southern discontent through the newspapers since before the country had torn itself apart and Goodnight’s name isn’t one easily forgotten. And, after both of them have been supplied with some bread and jam and Sam has provided the story of what he’s been through since he was last able to write, she presents Goodnight with a spare quilt and waves them both away to Sam’s room.

~~~

Sam knows how to read people because his mama taught him, and he’s never come across anyone who is better at working out what skittish people need to get them to lose their wariness than she is. He feels relief, the next morning, when she takes charge of Goodnight. Goodnight seems thankful as well, as he’s dispatched to fetch water, weed the garden, or collect eggs, but not asked about the war or his past. Ellen and Hannah take their cue from Ma, mostly, but Ellen aims to glean every detail she can get about what going to a boarding school is like, once she realizes the full extent of his formal education.

As word gets around that Sam is home, their neighbors start dropping in. This is when the gawking and whispering actually starts. Goodnight still looks nothing like a mudersome bogyman, but his reputation has far preceded him, and Sam can’t entirely blame anyone for their unease. Goodnight starts making himself scarce; their horses are so neatly groomed that they virtually shimmer in the sunlight and his hands are scrubbed raw and red every time Sam does see him.

It’s after this that Ma starts introducing him as Goody. She tells Sam, voice low and completely serious, that a boy like that never should have been saddled with such a fanciful name, when he obviously spent too much time as it was trapped in his own imagination. 

Goody is with them for a month before things finally come to a head.

~~~

Daniel Johnson, the baker’s boy, is over for dinner. He seems to be a good kid, kind and clever, but he’s clearly sweet on Hannah so Sam is already predisposed to find him abhorrent. They’re sitting around a soup made mostly from late summer vegetables when he gets up the nerve to ask Goody if it had taken him long to become a marksman. It isn’t meant to be harmful, but Sam can actually see the despair wash over Goody’s face, although he fakes a smile and spins a bloodless tale about target practice and winning extra rations from his fellows as he proved able to hit goals that became increasingly farther and smaller. His hands swoop around energetically to illustrate his anecdote and Daniel is clearly impressed by what he hears.

That night, Goody wakes up the whole house screaming, then weeps into Sam’s shoulder about the dead men who are following him and how scared he is to go home and face a family who is _proud_ of him because he ended up being good at ending lives.

He cries himself out while it’s still dark out, but he’s awake and trembling, Sam holding his body while his mind is clearly elsewhere, until sometime after the sun has come up, when he, depleted, finally falls asleep.

~~~

Explaining his nightmares to Sam seems to have shaken something loose inside of Goody. He sleeps fitfully for the next day, but once he wakes, he starts talking about how he ought to head home. Sam privately thinks it’s a terrible idea, but he can’t stand the thought of talking Goody out of it, now that he seems firmly determined to go.

Ma fixes Goody up a small bag of provisions, dried meat and fruit, a loaf of bread, and hands him a knitted scarf that he doesn’t really need now and surely won’t need the week after next. Hannah turns up with a shirt that the youngest of the Anderson boys had outgrow, slightly frayed at the cuffs but in better shape than what Goody’s been wearing, and washes it out and folds it neatly, commanding him to keep it aside until he actually gets to New Orleans, so that he’ll have something better to meet his family in, while Ellen offers him some little book of poems that makes his eyes brighten. 

Sam saddles up to make the trip with Goody down to Cairo, and he’s the only one who isn’t reduced to tears before they leave. Ma and the girls cling to Goody, who is still far too skinny in Sam’s mind, and they make him repeat back to them their promises that he’s welcome back at any time. 

Once in the city, they find a man who doesn’t seem too disreputable to buy Goody’s horse and saddle. Sam refuses to take any of the money, despite Goody’s protests, forcing him to tuck it all away to use form buying a ticket on a steamboat heading downriver. 

Before they part, Sam reaches out to grab the brim of Goody’s hat, tugging it on it playfully and telling Goody that he wants to hear from him again.

~~~

They don’t see each other with any sort of regularity, but Goody still manages to cross Sam’s path rather often. At first, it’s in the form of more headlines. He’s no longer the darling of the defunct confederacy, but suddenly everyone who has a story to tell about the war has met Goodnight. Books come out published with titles like _A Dairy of Private W.M. Campbell, Being the Personal Experiences of a Soldier of the 10th Louisiana Infantry, Including Recollections of His Encounter with Robicheaux, the Man Now Widely Styled the Angel of Death_ , written by someone who might have once saw him across the battlefield, but who gives him the same propaganda personality of wartime, so Goody remains powerful and dangerous in the eyes of the world, more zealously tethered to an image that he had never meant to earn, but one it seems that he’ll never outrun.

The real Goody comes in the form of letters. Sam’s caught a bit off guard when the first one arrives; he hadn’t thought to tell Goody to write, but one of the girls evidently had, and he’s thankful for it. It’s a thick stack of paper covered with neat, if needlessly ornamental, penmanship, and most of it seems to be descriptions of parties and fashion, frivolousness that’s pleasing its readers, while saying sadly little about Goody himself, although Sam does learn that he’s gotten his missing tooth replaced with a gold one that he’s been told makes him look quite winsome.

His letters come in sporadically, and they’re always entertaining, but Goody doesn’t seem settling back in. He rarely says so directly, but he mentions often enough the times when someone sees fit to applaud him as a war hero that Sam can feel his discomfort. Increasingly, too, are his remarks about charming the ladies have suddenly come to find his company, and Sam has to wonder how many of these women look at Goody and see only his name.

~~~

Sam has felt restless himself, although not for the same reasons. He wouldn’t say that the battlefield suited him, but he slowly comes to find himself bored as a civilian, utterly dissatisfied with the work available to him, and, after hearing talk about lawmen needed, out in areas that are a bit less settled, he makes a trip down to Arkansas. He arranges to get himself confirmed to collect on warrants, and starts setting out for a week or two at a time to hunt down men with bounties on their heads.

Ma had begun to talk about how the family might try their luck out somewhere new, maybe take advantage of the Homestead Act that had been signed in by poor President Lincoln and, whether Sam likes it or not, one day Ellen and Hannah likely are going to want to marry, and the extra income he’s earning will only help in either endeavor, in addition to being much more stimulating that any work he’d had while staying in Brooklyn. 

He makes sure to pen down his more interesting encounters to send off to Goody, doing his best to try to capture the beauty of the landscape along with the thrill of the chase; he likes his prose just find, but he doubts that his attempts at poetry are up to Goody’s standards, not that he lets that stop himself from trying.

~~~

Sam never directly suggests that Goody might like to come west with him. He carries a gun, most days, and never balks at using it, but he doesn’t want to invite Goody to put himself back in that position, as much as he thinks he’d enjoy working with him.

Goody, then, doesn’t actually leave Louisiana because of Sam. However, he ends a long monologue about attending some cousin’s ostentatious wedding with an aside about how lovely a place with no people sounds, and this is his last communication before a gap of over a month before they get the shortest missive the Goody has ever sent, a tatty scrap of paper informing them that he has decided to indulge his wanderlust, and that he’ll keep them informed as to when he next has a permanent place to receive his post.

~~~

As Sam drifts out to collect his bounties, going further and farther as he gets better at the tracking aspect of it, he finds that it’s unsurprisingly easy to keep track of Goody too. Every time Sam settles down to tuck into a meal or wet his throat, there’s somebody talking about running into _the_ Goodnight Robicheaux. Or, more disconcertingly, there’s someone talking about how they might benefit from knowing _the_ Goodnight Robicheaux.

Apparently, Goody’s drifting has been taken as a sign that he’s searching for some sort of an opportunity to come along that will give him a way back towards his wartime glory, and Sam hears rumors of lecture tours and shooting demonstrations, of bounty hunting organizations, of how Robicheaux is looking to run for sheriff or judge or mayor. He hears about just what it would mean if one’s daughter or sister could catch the eye of the Angel of Death and of what it would do to one’s reputation if they could outshoot him. 

In some nowhere town in the middle of Arkansas, Sam Chisolm hears talk about what one might gain from being the man who killed the Angel of Death and he starts a bar fight.

~~~

As Sam rides out of town, feeling a new soreness and an old tiredness, he starts thinking about what to do about the problem of Goody. Sam knows that he’s out here and not tucked away with what’s left of his family down in New Orleans because he’s running _from_ his wounded past, not looking to reclaim it, and he’s confused as to how any man with eyes can’t see this too. Goody all but radiates his vulnerability, in Sam’s view of it, and it’s because of that well of vulnerability that Sam feels justified in his worry. It isn’t unthinkable that Goody might be persuaded to go along with someone, if they approached him in the right way, if he was convinced that they _needed_ him, that they had use for the man, as opposed to the legend.

And Goody could do with being needed by someone, but all any of these no accounts would do is use him up and leave him behind, broken down the way he was the first time that Sam stumbled across him. What Goody deserves to have is an honest partner, someone who he needs, as much as they need him, and, most importantly, someone who won’t care that he’s Goodnight Robicheaux.

Sam thinks about Goody letting himself be beat on by those boys back in Pennsylvania, about Goody letting himself be dragged around New Orleans and shown off like some trophy, and he sighs. Goody is never going to find someone like that, if left to his own devices, so Sam reasons that he ought to take up the task, if only to save himself another sore lip and lost bounty the next time he has to hear about someone who means to improve their life by trying to end Goody’s.

Sam tips his head skyward and pleads for luck.

~~~

Sam runs into a snag in his plan nearly immediately, by virtue of the realization that other than his sisters, who both dote on Goody with more familial affection than they typically give to Sam himself, he doesn’t know of anyone young enough who he’d trust to ride around with Goody and take care of him. Truth be told, Sam’s always been on the serious side, acting old even when he was young, which didn’t leave him knowing many people who he counts as more than simple acquaintances or potential future contacts.

What he does have, though, is a never-ending supply of names, faces, and descriptions, and maybe these are supposed to be guiding him to _criminals_ , but Sam’s always been a little… flexible on that front. It didn’t take him long to realize that while all of then men he hunts down have stories to tell once he catches up to them, some of them actually are victims of circumstances beyond their control, and while Sam doesn’t have the power to make their warrants just vanish, it’s plenty easy to look away, maybe slip them a quiet word about how he’d tracked them down, so that they might prevent someone else from doing the same.

These people, too, the ones who’ve been forced to do things they may not have wanted to, who hadn’t thought through the consequences of their actions until it was too late, often have pasts that haunt them. These people might have a chance at understanding Goody, of recognizing the man who’s buried underneath the name and the fame.

Sam pulls out his most current stack of warrants and starts reviewing candidates.

~~~

It takes him five months. He works his way through twelve men wanted for some manner of murder, three robbers, and five rustlers, as well as three additional men wanted for an accumulation of pettier crimes. Fourteen of them have never heard of Shakespeare. Three of them speak wistfully about the lost Confederacy, when plied with a bit of drink. One of them mistreats his women, another his horse. Over half of them spend too much time gambling, in Sam’s opinion. The most promising man among them doesn’t so much as pick up a newspaper in the entire three weeks that Sam spends discreetly following him.

Another month passes, and then two more. Goody has done spells as a farmhand for at least three different families, talked his way out of at least five different duels, and spent two weeks playing piano at a bar in Wyoming Territory, an endeavor that was apparently well received. 

Then, Sam is handed the papers for Park Bo-gyeong.

~~~

It’s hard for him to get a measure for whether Park might be suited for Goody at first because Sam can’t find him. He takes this as a good sign; he’s not too humble to say that he’s good at his job, so this man is at least smart enough to stay out of Sam’s reach, right up until he’s not. Sam follows a trail of derogatory rumors into a town full of angry, wounded men and a blacksmith who refused to service Park’s kind when he’d stopped in to have his animal reshod, and then he notices the pattern. Park seems content to drift around, minding his business as lawfully as someone fingered for a few killings by the railroad can, right up until he’s denied the chance to continue being lawful.

After that, it becomes much easier to figure out where he’s been, even if Sam still can’t predict where he’s going. Sam finds mostly broken bones in his wake, although there are a few men killed creatively with household objects, and Sam notes that Park seems to avoid using guns; most of his carnage appears provoked, although the sort of people taking umbrage at Park aren’t always so willing to tell someone like Sam exactly what’s caused their predicaments. 

Park doesn’t pick fights. He doesn’t seek notoriety. Sam doesn’t hear any stories of him being cruel, and, from what he can tell, Park seems to be just as alone as Goody. Sam allows himself to feel hopeful.

Park is locked up for a week in a jail in Beaumont, Texas, although he’s gone before Sam gets there, so his jailers must not have known who they had. He left a note upon his departure, but Sam can’t read a word of it, so he’s left torn between hoping the Park had gotten in a last word before he’d picked the lock and fled or wanting him to have left a thank you for the men who had been holding him. Either way, it’s something that Goody would appreciate.

~~~

Sam runs into Goody eight days later. He acts on a whim and leaves Park’s warrant in Goody’s rucksack, along with a new pair of socks, hopefully done in such a way that will having Goody assuming that the paper was a mistake and not thinking about it too consciously, distracted by his annoyance over being given something that he had needed but hadn’t asked for.

As his parting words, Sam suggests that Goody might want to give Texas a try.

~~~

Five months later, Sam knocks out a man who is mouthing off about how fancy Goodnight Robicheaux’s manservant is.

~~~

The man who rides in with Goody isn’t really Billy Rocks. Or, rather, he wasn’t always Billy Rocks. Sam had never gotten the chance to formally make his acquaintance, in his former life, but he’s incredibly pleased to now, after all that he’s heard about him.

Sam hugs Goody and tweaks his hat. Goody smiles up at him with blue eyes full of laughter and Sam thinks that he, at least, might actually be happy.

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone is interested, here’s some general background information for this story, in terms of times, places, and transportation.
> 
> Sam and Goody first meet up during the summer of 1865 somewhere in southern Pennsylvania. Sam’s coming from points further east, but Goody was heading down from lower New York State. I've been completely convinced by 1ltreede  that Goody spent some time as a POW up in [Elmira, New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elmira_Prison), so he’s still making his way back south after being released. I’ve also taken inspiration from [ their fabulous timeline](http://1ltreede.tumblr.com/post/151845455508/time-lines-or-i-care-too-much-about-a-fictional), although I’m in agreement with 28ghost’s [musings](http://twentyeightghosts.tumblr.com/post/154265565357/hmmmmm-so-if-goodnight-had-been-18-when-hed), which have Goodnight as being about five years younger than Ethan Hawke rather than using the actor's age, so Goody is about 26 when he meets Sam and around 30 when he meets Billy, (and then 40 during the events of the movie).
> 
> The guys are traveling west along the [National Road](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/back0103.cfm), which was the United States’ first federally funded highway. It was built between 1811 and 1837, although responsibility for it had largely been turned over to the states by the 1830s. It started in Cumberland, Maryland and construction was halted in Vandalia, Illinois, running 620 miles in total. 
> 
> Sam ran across Goody somewhere around Uniontown, PA, and from there to Vandalia it’s about 550 miles, traveling along Interstate 70, which runs roughly equivalent to where the National Road was (Route 40 would apparently have been a more direct match, but that road was largely bypassed by I-70 in the 1960s, so I’m having troubling getting a more exact measurement). The internet has [suggested to me](http://www.wwwestra.com/horses/history_travel.htm) that a man traveling on horseback probably would have averaged 20 to 30 miles a day, which makes it a 27.5 day trip if they were just managing to hit 20 miles. Given that they only had one horse to work with at first, that Goody wasn’t in the best shape, and that they stopped periodically to rest the horses and get supplies and whatnot, Sam and Goody were probably something closer to six weeks getting to Vandalia.
> 
> From there, they headed to Sam’s family home in [Brooklyn, Illinois](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn,_Illinois), which would have taken them another two or three days. Brooklyn was a majority black town settled by freed and runaway slaves in 1829, and by the 1860s its African American population was well over 200 people. The Chisolms had not decided to go homesteading yet, so they are alive and well during almost all of this story, which is also why Sam is perhaps a bit more soft hearted than he is in canon. 
> 
> The steamboat trip that Goody made from Cairo, Illinois (after another five or so days on horse) down to New Orleans could apparently have been made in a little over three days [as of 1853](http://www.nytimes.com/1864/09/18/news/steamboat-travel-on-the-mississippi.html?pagewanted=all), but this time was achieved during a steamboat race, so I assume that regularly scheduled, non-racing trips may have taken an extra day or so. Math isn’t my thing, so if any of these numbers seem unreasonable, let me know.
> 
> Also, I'm on tumblr [here](http://boromir-queries-sean.tumblr.com/), if you have further comments, questions, or if you just want to talk.


End file.
